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IF THERE’S A PHYSICAL SYMBOL of what the combination of the post at its peak, the mighty railroad, and the Progressive Era’s politics had achieved by the early twentieth century, it must be the James A. Farley Post Office, in New York City. (First known as the Pennsylvania Terminal, then the General Post Office Building, it was later renamed for President Franklin Roosevelt’s powerful postmaster general.) This treasure of the City Beautiful movement, built in 1912 by the prestigious architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, proclaims itself to be the epicenter of the busiest, most important city in the United States—perhaps the world. The building sprawls across two full blocks of prime Manhattan real estate, on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd Streets; its five stories wrap around a great central courtyard that flooded its work spaces with glorious natural light. The unbroken front stairs run the entire length of the façade and lead up to a spectacular gold-embellished lobby that would have gratified Louis XIV.
The Farley is one of America’s most beautiful post offices and also its most famous. The grand façade is engraved with what’s often mistakenly assumed to be the post’s motto: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” (The quotation, paraphrased from Herodotus, is appropriate enough, but the post has no official maxim, and the “couriers” referred to in the original text were the Persian empire’s.) The building was also the architectural costar, along with the nearby Macy’s department store, in the classic 1947 holiday film Miracle on 34th Street, which was based on the thesis that the Santa Claus on trial must be real because New York City’s august post office—and thus the federal government—delivered children’s letters to him. (The labyrinthine building is also said to have been an inspiration for Terry Pratchett’s noir novel Going Postal.) Until 2009, the Farley had the distinction of being the only post office in the nation that was open twenty-four hours a day, every day of the week.
Like some other great post offices of the era, the Farley was built as the companion of an equally magnificent railroad terminal across the street. (The original Pennsylvania Station building was tragically demolished in 1963 to create the ugly, dysfunctional Madison Square Garden.) Locating major mail facilities next to, or on top of, the new “union” stations that merged the tracks of a city’s various rail lines increased postal efficiency by enabling Railway Post Office cars to be loaded and unloaded without delay. The grand post office that Daniel Burnham designed for Washington, D.C., which is now the home of the National Postal Museum, is similarly located just across the street from his Union Station. Although Chicago handled about a sixth of the nation’s mail and was a major rail hub—and therefore an airline hub later—its Old Main Post Office lacked this vital connection with a train terminal, which compromised its efficiency long before its famous crisis in the 1960s.
The Farley was a world unto itself, complete with its own carpenters, electricians, nurses, and cooks. The city’s mail volume required at least two thousand employees to be on the job at any one time. The vast work area behind the elegant lobby hummed with hundreds of clerks sorting the mail sent up from the rail tracks below; to get the job in such a big city, they had to be able to process at least a hundred addresses in five to six minutes with very few errors. The building provided them, the big corps of letter carriers, and other employees with lockers, lunchrooms, and amenities including an elaborate ventilation system that rid the air of dust, horse manure, and detritus that clung to mailbags. Postal crime was a major concern in the nation’s financial capital, and the building was equipped with safes, a barred, room-size vault, and even a jail; inspectors on the lookout for theft prowled unseen on windowed walkways concealed in ceilings.
The Farley’s executive suite, illuminated by floor-to-ceiling windows running along the great eastern façade, was as grand as the headquarters of the era’s richest robber baron. The gorgeous reception room opened onto a conference room to the right and a secretary’s office to the left, which in turn led to the postmaster’s inner sanctum, complete with a white marble fireplace, four huge chandeliers, and a full bath. These swanky rooms were linked by interior doors that protected top postal executives from mingling with the rank and file, but in keeping with the era’s Progressive politics, the Farley’s utilitarian spaces were dignified by high-quality materials, custom hardware, and beautifully designed staircases.
Even the most junior of the Farley’s hundreds of clerks or thousands of daily visitors could not have missed the architectural message sent by the post at its peak: being an American is a very fine thing, and so too is this great public institution. As Clyde Kelly, one of its powerful members, wrote, “Congress was building on the policy that the paramount duty of the Post Office Establishment is to furnish the most useful facilities that the mind of man can provide, at charges which will lead to the widest possible use, through workers who are assured fair play and working conditions.”
14
STARVING THE POST
LIKE INDIVIDUALS, societies respond to changes in the environment with changes in behavior. By 1920, powerful political, social, and economic forces had shifted mainstream America’s mood from the Progressive Era’s expansive extroversion and idealistic view of government toward a fractious introversion and skepticism of President Woodrow Wilson’s reforms and exalted rhetoric. In 1917, he had drawn the United States into World War I in order to make the world “safe for democracy,” but that bloodbath had produced little but barbarism abroad and disillusionment at home. His oracular pronouncements—“You are not here to make a living. . . . You are here to enrich the world”—no longer resonated with working people after his economic policies contributed to high inflation and violent strikes in 1919 and a recession in 1920. During this time of heightened tensions, millions of European immigrants and rural blacks flocked to the big industrial cities in search of employment, which increased competition for jobs. The “Red Scare” set off by the Russian Revolution of 1917 fueled suspicion of alleged socialists and anarchists. This tumult in urban America added to the general sense that the federal government, so recently widely admired, could no longer seem to control events at home, much less abroad.
The antigovernment sentiment even extended to the post, long its most popular enterprise. The department offered a stunning array of cheap, excellent services, now including Rural Free Delivery, Parcel Post, and Postal Savings, and during the war, it had made heroic efforts to get the troops’ mail overseas by ship. The post had lost personnel to the military, however, and suffered from war-related problems with the railroads that compromised domestic mail service. Periodic congressional investigations of its finances had also drawn attention to its high transportation expenses. As usual, no one could figure out the exact cost of moving the mail, but there was general agreement that the railroads’ compensation was suspiciously high; one report showed that the companies charged the post five times what they charged other freight customers.
In 1916, a Congress now fixated on the department’s costs authorized like-minded Postmaster General Albert Burleson to pay the railroads on the basis of the space the mail required rather than on its weight. This change, along with his decision to reduce rail-mail mileage, significantly cut the post’s costs, and the next year, Burleson went further. Taking on the powerful publishing lobby, he orchestrated the first true increase on postage for periodicals since the 1790s. The Democrats’ strenuous efforts to report a surplus also worsened postal service, however, which further soured public opinion and gave Republicans a potent campaign issue.
America’s shift toward favoring business over government was writ large in an important legislative decision that ended a policy debate that had bridged two centuries. In 1918, Wilson and Burleson had taken control of the telegraph and the telephone, along with the railroads, as a wartime measure, in hopes that this step would lead to securing the communications services permanently for
the post. The war had temporarily increased the two systems’ volume, operating expenses, and charges, however, which cast an unflattering if unfair light on the government’s management abilities. Private enterprise, which had opposed the postal telegraph since the 1840s, now had the advantage over the equally enduring forces asserting that Americans were better served when the government ran the nation’s communications. In 1919, Congress reflected the national mood by finally settling the question and returning the telegraph, along with the telephone, to private control.
If the post sometimes suffered unjustly from the antigovernment backlash, it was also tarnished by its involvement in the wave of xenophobia sweeping the nation. The Espionage Act of 1917, passed during World War I, made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States.” To the dismay of the First Amendment’s defenders, Burleson ordered local postmasters to hand over any suspicious pamphlets, magazines, or antiwar materials they encountered; he also used the law to try to put dissident publications out of business by refusing to circulate them in the mail. Authorized to censor foreign communications as well, the postmaster general set 1,600 monitors to opening some 125,000 pieces of mail from abroad each day in search of “socialistic,” antiwar, and pro-union matter. In 1917, even Christmas gifts to American troops abroad were opened, inspected, and repacked before shipment. (The postal censorship imposed during the war was discontinued soon after the armistice in 1918.)
The fear of danger lurking in the mail, though disproportional, was not entirely unfounded. In April 1919, thirty-six bombs designed to explode on the Communist holiday of May Day had been mailed to prominent American politicians and business titans. The Department of Justice responded to these grave crimes with the so-called Palmer Raids, named for their leader, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, a presidential contender and mentor of the young J. Edgar Hoover. Agents conducted warrantless searches, tampered with mail, and arrested thousands of people on the mere suspicion of treason. Hundreds of citizens were convicted, and hundreds of foreigners were deported. The Palmer Raids proved to be unpopular, however, and were ended in 1920 by strong opposition from political liberals, the press, and the Department of Labor, which was in charge of deportations.
The war had been a tremendous stimulus to American industry, and pro-business sentiment swept Republican Warren G. Harding into the White House in 1921. The new president was a folksy Ohioan whose “front porch” campaign had promised to put an end to federal controls, public unrest, and Wilsonian philosophizing. He guaranteed a return to “normalcy,” based not on “heroics, but healing . . . not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment . . . not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.” This new credo asserted that America’s future lay with the private sector and an enthusiastic embrace of mechanization, technology, and efficiency. The Progressive politics of social reform gave way to the “business progressivism” personified by Thomas Edison and by Henry Ford, the father of the industrial assembly line. Government’s role was no longer to lead but to cooperate with private enterprise or get out of the way.
In a momentous if little remarked upon change, some legislators and even some of the department’s own managers began to drift away from the broad historical understanding of the post as an almost open-ended public service and began to recast it as a business. Instead of thinking in terms of what the post could next do for the people, officials grew preoccupied with increasing its revenue and reducing its deficits. In 1929, Postmaster General Walter Brown, appointed by Republican president Herbert Hoover, reflected this change by flatly stating that the post was simply a business whose narrow purpose was the profitable transmission of first-class letters. (When the press gleefully discovered that the postmaster general had ordered a special government limousine that enabled him to get in and out without removing his top hat, “High Hat” Brown soon became a symbol of Republican elitism amid the Depression.)
Some in government did not accede to this diminution of the postal mandate, notably Republican congressman Clyde Kelly, a force on the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, and a progressive defender of public service and postal innovation. To him, the department’s deficit was an investment in the nation’s future prosperity: “The great postal highway of the United States is the people’s thoroughfare, the main artery of the nation’s life. It was not built in a day or a generation, nor is its task finished today, but its record in the past is the inspiring promise of its betterment in the future.” Kelly took particular exception to Brown’s attempt to redefine the post as a mere business for transporting letters, calling it instead a “great adventure in human service.” He reminded Americans that historically, whether Republicans or Democrats controlled the White House or Congress, “the Post Office has been used in new ways for the promotion of the general welfare. . . . When new conditions arose where additional benefits could be extended through this nationwide enterprise, there was no hesitation in following the path of national progress.” Nothing illustrated Kelly’s assertion more vividly than the post’s new Air/Mail Service, which he championed.
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LONG BEFORE THE TERM “business progressivism” was coined, the post’s subsidies had supported independent carriers from stagecoach proprietors to railroad moguls, but of all these contributions, its often single-handed support of the aviation industry from 1918 into the 1940s stands out as the most remarkable. As Kelly observed, “The greatest single difference between America and other countries is that America has discovered the importance of saving time.” Postal executives since Benjamin Franklin had been obsessed with speeding up the mail and were quick to seize on flight’s potential in that regard; in 1856, the American balloonist John Wise had carried the first official U.S. mail by air across thirty miles of Indiana.
When Orville and Wilbur Wright made history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, even the fastest train still took four and a half days to travel coast to coast. Postal management saw that the new aeroplane was the ultimate mail carrier, but to put it mildly, there were major obstacles to realizing that dream. America had no aviation industry to fulfill transportation contracts and none of the infrastructure, from airports to runways to searchlights, that would allow for flight on a large scale. Other than entertaining the crowds at air shows, planes themselves didn’t seem to have much utility, much less airmail.
Postmaster General Frank Harris Hitchcock, an energetic, progressive Republican politician and aviation enthusiast who served from 1909 to 1913, was nevertheless eager to run the experiment. In 1911, he appointed Earle Ovington to be the post’s first official “aeroplane mail carrier” and paid the pilot a dollar from his own wallet to seal the deal. During a weeklong aviation meet, Ovington boarded the Dragonfly, his monoplane, settled the mailbag on his lap, and did daily six-mile round-trips from Garden City, on New York’s Long Island, to nearby Mineola. On the first day, he tossed the bag to the ground from an altitude of five hundred feet, whereupon it broke and spewed the contents. In the best postal tradition, the letters and postcards were quickly retrieved and delivered to the recipients.
World War I provided a showcase for demonstrating the new airplane’s potential, at least for military purposes. Congress remained skeptical but nevertheless authorized an airmail trial, conducted by the post and the Army, between New York City and Washington, D.C. The plane selected to launch what was first called the U.S. Aerial Mail Service in 1918 was the Curtiss JN-4 single-engine biplane. The light, fragile “Jenny,” constructed largely of wood and cloth, had been designed to train pilots for warfare, not to transport cargo; its interior was tiny, and its small 150-horsepower engine could only travel at 66 miles per hour for 175 miles before refueling. Damning the Jenny with faint praise, Army pilot Ernest M. Allison said that it was “a very safe airplan
e, because the carburetor would vibrate the airplane so badly that it would shake the ice off the wings.”
Something of the sheer zaniness of aviation’s early days, when daredevil barnstormers and their stunts drew crowds to fairgrounds across the nation, comes across in accounts of the Aerial Mail Service’s northbound kickoff on May 15. President Wilson, Postmaster General Burleson, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, Admiral Robert Peary, Alexander Graham Bell, and many other dignitaries gathered to watch Lieutenant George L. Boyle, a socially well-connected if newly fledged Army pilot, take off with the mail. After a twenty-minute delay, someone realized that the Jenny had no gas. After it finally departed, the unfortunate Boyle got lost, heading south instead of north because he had followed the wrong set of train tracks out of Washington. In hopes of getting his bearings, he landed the plane in a field, breaking the propeller in the process. When his second attempt the next day ended with a crash on a Philadelphia golf course, he was sent back to flight school. The service’s southbound flight from New York City, however, was a success.
The hapless young aviator’s northbound debacle was partly excused by the early planes’ technology or, rather, the lack of it. Pilots flew in open, deafeningly noisy cockpits in all weather, protected only by a pair of goggles and clothing made of wind-resistant leather and warm fur. Their compasses were unreliable, and they had no other navigational instruments, much less radios, airports, or control towers. They mostly relied on “dead reckoning,” gauging their position by estimating the direction and distance they’d traveled, and on “contact flying”—looking down at the terrain below for landmarks, such as towns, rivers, or the “iron compass” of railroad tracks—which in bad weather might require a descent to a mere forty feet above the ground.
How the Post Office Created America Page 23
